Joy. Laughter. Dance and more dance. Pride and tradition, modernity and
Classicism. These are the languages of the Ethiopian youth and some of their parents on this cold winter night as they jubilantly flood the dance floor.

The dance floor at a huge hall is readied to accommodate over a thousand people bursting with the exuberance of youth, the fire of joy, the swings and twists of modern Ethiopian dance responding to the groveling multicultural band of a Caucasian trumpeter, an oriental clarinet and an Ethiopian female singer dominated this winter night in the city of Watertown, Massachusetts, on December 9, 2006.

The king of  Ethiopian music was hidden somewhere in the background. The crowd which knows his lurking presence is anxious with apprehension, for it knows that the handsome man from the land of AtumRa, the Egyptian transcendent, about whom the late king of Ethiopian poetry, Mr. Tsegaye Gebremedhin wrote, is lurking in the background -living music, quietly singing its verses, endlessly perfecting the performance for the historic night and drinking from the endless well of wisdom and love

The crowd also wanted to quench its thirst by drinking from the king's music, the king's passion. He was there in the back, but no where to be seen. The music roars on, and youth danced with hips swinging, shoulders vibrating and
legs moving gracefully and carrying the anxious bodies of hundreds of Ethiopians
patiently waiting for the appearance of the king himself. The doctor of music  holds on and keeps the crowd waiting. Dance. More dance. Shouts and more shouts. The music roars on and the saxophoneis going out of control.

Finally, a man, larger than life, firmly planted in a wheel chair makes his way
to the center of the stage, and the seated audience of Ethiopian celebrities
leave their seats, rise and walk to the ends of the stage and salute and pay
their tribute to Dr. Telahun Gessese, the Ethiopian genius, the man who has no
match, and whose feet will never be filled by another singer's shoes.
He is Ethiopian music at the height of its perfection, and the depth of its
living wisdom. With him music is philosophy and philosophy itself attains the
musicality that the ancients have yearned.  For in his slender hands music
becomes a therapy for those whose hearts have been broken by love, for all
those who know the dangers of love and still dare to taste its bitter/sweet
pills. To them he has come to sing this night in a wheel chair reserved for all
those geniuses that God has chosen for one of his hidden missions toward the
last part of their living lives.

The king of music has chosen for a mission and he carries it out with a biting
courage and embodied it in an extraordinary intelligence of the human heart.
Medium height, with a chiseled nose, a long face and an arresting completion,
the doctor /artist sits on and sings to eternity. Love, death, sorrow, purpose,
silence, solitude and the joy that kills were the themes of his heartbreaking
songs. He grabbs the microphone so close to his soul and projected that voice,
which refuses to die in the air, until the listener is driven to tears and the
heart is threatened with the possibility of death. His music is fated to bring
the audience to the brink of joy, the joy that could kill, and the fulfillment
that makes you move towards God. His music is spiritual and carnal, therapeutic
and transcdental, which takes you behind the veil of appearance to the depth of
the hidden reality.

Yes he sings  tirelessly as he has for the last decades  as the king of
Ethiopian music. The night is over and the reluctant crowd parted with respect and gratefulness to the transcendent for implanting this man in the Ethiopian soil, and now as he moves towards death, he is crowned with the mission to serve, to do the Lord's work, and so I am lucky to breakfast with him at the Red Sea, Boston's premier Ethiopian restaurant, shortly before he left.

When we meet there on a sunny Sunday, he muses for over an hour and half about music and its vocation. His mission now is to open a clinic for the victims of
diabetes, the very disease that confined him to a wheelchair, from where, a
night before, he sang with arresting brilliance, candor and purposefulness of a
young man, born to sing with the vigor of agelessness. Participating in a long
debate about the role of the artist in the age of "mechanical reproduction," he
argues compellingly that for him,  "the artist is a harbinger of change, a moral
mediator of human values, and that his long dream has been to fight for the
brick layers, the gold and silver smiths, and the lowly paid soldiers and maids
who break their backs to make a living, and are then stereotyped by the rich and
powerful as unfit and unqualified to marry whomever they love, by being cast
away as the untouchable." He continued, "I have attempted to play a part in restoring their dignities, and now their children are in visible political spaces running administrative centers of power, all the way from the palace to the modern bureaucracies". His classic song "Kememot Aldenem" does indeed herald their names and sing their praises, and they in turn gave him the tragic thematics of his songs, delivered with inimitable voice, clear and deep- for the last fifty-three years. For he began singing at the tender of age eleven, and had not stopped since. He remembered those early years fondly.

He praised all those artists of the past, from Germany to the USA, who used art
to be the mediator of meaning without loosing its autonomy and serving the
whims of power holders; he praised even more all those Ethiopian artists of the
past who fought for the poor by making them present in our consciences and our
lives. For him, " Art is both free and restrained, it is free to create out of
the imagination by constructing its own laws of beauty and standards of
excellence, and restrained by the commitment to the public, its joys and pains
and its dreams and frustrations."

He uses art as autonomous and engaged, private and public. What pleases him most is the presence of the young who come to see him, to touch him and on whom he attempts to pass on his unfulfilled mission of fighting for the afflicted, the
poor, the overburdened, the alienated and all those who are languishing inside
the gates of poverty.

At one weak moment he cries and says, "In spite of the limited numbers of those
who came, I am lucky that I have seventy five million Ethiopians backing me in
my endeavor to do the Lord's work, which is service to Ethiopian humanity,
service to art and the artist as a social agent, as a purposeful mediator of
truth and justice in the right way and at the right time. Ethiopians are my
social capital, the source and foundations of my music. How much I long to open
a school on the human voice, so that the tradition of classical Ethiopian music
could be passed on across generations."

The king is moved by the hundreds of youth who stretched their longing hands to
touch the geniuses' soul by feeling his tender and loving hands. They stood by
him adoringly, they took pictures of him for remembrance of things past. Some
cried. Some froze with hypnotized stares, and many danced almost to death. He
remembers them all with eyes filled with unshed tears, he remembers them
because they vindicated him, because they know first hand the power of Eros,
the urge to create by always being behind the limits of experience, where art
meets danger, and where life risks death, for the sake of creating and
following the silent laws of beauty, of tragedy and death itself.

Toward the end, Mr. Bekele and Ms. Misrak, the generous owners of the Red Sea
Restaurant, and Mr. Tadesse, the distinguished owner of Quality@Your Service, a very close friend of the artist/ doctor, and I pushed the wheelchair on which
sat the king of Ethiopian music up from the basement floor, and thus leaves the
voice of love, of hope and of faith.

That is how I remember the man from the North. May God embrace his in the warmth of his Kingdom.